What is a search engine

Think of the Internet as the world’s biggest library – but instead of books, its shelves contain billions of individual web pages.

In a library, you have an index to help you track down the book you want. The Internet has something similar in the form of ‘search engines’.

Top Search Engines

Search engines are special websites that have indexed billions of pages. The first search engine was developed as a school project by Alan Emtage, a student in Montreal.

Today, popular search engines include Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. To get to a search engine, you just need to go to your browser’s address bar and type in the address of the search engine website.

In the search engine’s homepage, you’ll find a single box. You simply type whatever you want to search for into that box. The search engine then searches its collection of billions of documents and does two things. First it returns only those results that are relevant to the searcher’s query, and second, it ranks those results according to the popularity.